The summer before 10th class, I was assigned a book to read for AP European History called A Earth Lit Only Past Fire. It was written by an elderly scholar of 20th-century history who, by his own admission, had never studied the Middle Ages before, or consulted any primary sources from the period. The blurb on the back of the book sums up its general tenor pretty well: "In handsomely crafted prose, and with the grace and authorisation of his extraordinary gift for narrative history, William Manchester leads us from a civilization tottering on the brink of collapse to the grandeur of its rebirth—the dense explosion of energy that spawned some of history'southward greatest poets, philosophers, painters, adventurers, and reformers, as well every bit some of its most spectacular villains—the Renaissance."

The Middle Ages, the book confidently informed us, were a m-year period during which literally nil happened. Everyone only sat effectually in a puddle of their own liquefied shit, scratching their plague buboes, worrying, if they lived near water, whether all the great large ships were going to autumn over the edge of the world. I mean, these people didn't even have clocks. How do you even know what time it is if you don't have clocks? Clearly, medieval people were idiots, who probably didn't even call back of themselves as individuals. Thank God the Renaissance came along, and everybody of a sudden remembered that Greece and Rome had existed, and spontaneously invented Science, or we would probably all be dead.

At present, at this point in my adolescence, I was something of an amateur medieval historian. I had watched numerous episodes of a TV show chosen Cadfael, starring Derek Jacobi as a 12th-century Benedictine monk who solves murder mysteries, and I knew that lots of things had happened during the Middle Ages. I stormed in on the get-go day of school and gave my AP Euro teacher a piece of my mind. What about Roger Bacon! What about illuminated manuscripts! What near Gothic cathedrals! "And nobody in the Center Ages thought the world was flat!" I fumed. "Washington Irving but made that upwards in the 19th century while writing a biography of Christopher Columbus on a tight deadline!"

My teacher, who was the JV wrestling coach, received my complaints benignly, but without any apparent interest. This, I have since discovered, is most as practiced a reception as you're always going to get if, in an ordinary social setting, you choose to launch into an unprompted rant about how the Center Ages were pretty interesting, actually. Bearing this in mind, the popular conception of the Eye Ages nevertheless needs correcting. Most people, if they call up of the Middle Ages at all, think of them as the "Nighttime Ages," the long stretch of obscure barbarism between the celebrity that was Rome and the other glory that was the Renaissance. But that is false: they were pretty interesting, actually.

T he Middle Ages are in the public imagination these days more than than they were previously—and not but considering of all of us have at least i friend who won't shut upwards nigh Game of Thrones. The alt-right and "Bannon-style conservatives," those mannerly new spurs on the evolutionary tree of white supremacy, have a special fondness for the menstruation, assertive that electric current conflict between "Islamic extremists" and "the West" is merely a continuation of an elemental "clash of civilizations" that began with the Islamic caliphates in Europe and the Crusader states in the Holy State. The Crusader battle weep Deus vult (God wills) is cropping up all kinds of places, from YouTube comments sections to the walls of vandalized Midwestern mosques. At the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017, a few polo-shirted knights-errant even came bearing simulated-medieval shields.

None of this is annihilation especially new: white supremacists have a well-documented fondness for the Middle Ages, or rather, whatever Wonderbread version of the Middle Ages was being acted out on Hollywood soundstages in the 1950s. But the increased prominence of medieval references cropping upwards in correct-wing detest oral communication has prompted a number of medieval academics to wonder if they should exist publicly denouncing white supremacy to their higher survey courses. (At that place was also a pocket-sized scandal in the world of medieval academia when a tenured professor at the Academy of Chicago was revealed to be an agog camp follower of Milo Yiannopoulos, whom she inexplicably praised as a "chivalrous" defender of the weak). And at that place's no denying that actually, teaching history correctly tin sometimes change minds: Derek Black, a formerly agile white supremacist whose godfather was David Duke, became disillusioned with his family's ideology partly through beingness exposed to a more nuanced presentation of medieval history in college. (Now he'south appare ntly a graduate pupil of early medieval history. Deus vult indeed!)

It's also worth pointing out that in that location is a separate, less prominent tradition of left-wing enthusiasm for the menstruation, more often than not in connection with early English language socialism of the industrialization-skeptic, cooperative school. In 1888, William Morris wrote a novella called The Dream of John Ball, based on the so-called Peasants' Defection of 1381. This homage to John Ball, a renegade priest, was based on a remarkable speech he is said to accept given to a crowd of discontented English language farmers, as recorded in a slightly after Latin chronicle:

Whan Adam dalf, and Eve span, Wo was thanne a gentilman?' And continuing his sermon, he tried to bear witness past the words of the proverb that he had taken for his text, that from the beginning all men were created equal by nature, and that servitude had been introduced by the unjust and evil oppression of men, against the will of God, who, if it pleased him to create serfs, surely in the beginning of the world would have appointed who should be a serf and who a lord. Let them consider, therefore, that He had at present appointed the time wherein, laying aside the yoke of long servitude, they might, if they wished, savor their liberty and then long desired. Wherefore they must be prudent, hastening to act, first killing the peachy lords of the realm, then slaying the lawyers, justices and jurors, and finally rooting out everyone whom they knew to be harmful to the community in the future. So at last they would obtain peace and security if, when the bully ones had been removed, they maintained among themselves equality of liberty and nobility, as well as of dignity and power.

All this a skilful 400 years before Thomas Paine'due south Common Sense, or the Announcement of the Rights of Man!

The internet, besides, has awakened a new kind of enthusiasm for medieval cultural products: these days I see a lot of medieval art, a smashing deal of which is hilariously odd (sometimes intentionally, other times unintentionally), making the rounds on social media. In a more serious vein, there has likewise been a lot of involvement in sharing medieval art that depicts people of color, disrupting the mistaken notion that medieval Europe was some kind of monochromatic country club.

Now, nosotros mustn't go too far in the other direction: the Middle Ages were non some kind of utopia of happy farmers and cheerful craftsmen, as the early Arts & Crafts socialists sometimes liked to imagine. Nor, as I've sometimes seen information technology claimed on the net, was information technology an inherently more "tolerant" era than the post-exploration era of conquest and imperialism, due to the fact that there was no "racism" and no "slavery." It'south true that medieval people didn't retrieve nigh race in the biological terms that modern racists practise—to the extent that medieval thinkers had a "scientific explanation" for race, they theorized that it was climate-based, such that if y'all relocated and adjusted to a drastically different climate, your children would likely be built-in looking similar the natives, non like you—but they definitely drew distinctions between different "peoples," and religious hatreds, especially anti-Semitism, were oftentimes extremely virulent. And while slavery wasn't a visible fixture of the social order the manner it had been in the Roman world, or equally information technology would become over again in parts of the early mod world, there was a lucrative slave merchandise in not-Christian slaves between Eastern Europe and the Centre East. From these "Slavs," in fact, we derived our word "slaves."

On the other hand, a lot of other stereotypes we associate with the Middle Ages are simply incorrect. Medieval people didn't really burn women every bit witches: that was an innovation of afterward centuries. And although Neil deGrasse Tyson cautions Flat Earthers that their thinking is "five centuries regressed," educated people in the Heart Ages never believed the earth was flat. No: some clever bastards in antiquity had deduced the roundness of the earth through conscientious observation of the sky and of the horizon, long earlier the invention of the telescope. Scholars of the Middle Ages preserved this aboriginal knowledge, and re-confirmed and expanded upon it through their own calculations. (That the Earth is a globe is certainly not something I'd always have figured out on my own, without having been told. Possibly, I am too stupid even to have lived in medieval times.)

So how should we think of the Heart Ages, and so? Well, I don't know. For starters, it's a huge swathe of historical fourth dimension: the Middle Ages encompass approximately the years 500-1500. It makes as much sense to say, "what should we recall of everything that happened between 1500 and 2500?" ("What, everything?" you lot would exclaim. "The colonization of the Americas? The invention of the accordion? The shocking discovery that our entire universe is a poorly-designed video game being focus-tested in another dimension? It's too much!") Europe is a big geographic region, too. When nosotros talk nigh the Middle Ages, typically, we're only talking about Europe—y'all could theoretically talk about "medieval" China if you want to designate the same group of centuries, merely since Chinese history is divided into a completely different set of periods based on its own civilizational timeline, that doesn't make a lot of sense. Only even if nosotros're just talking nigh the European continent and immediate environs, that'south still a lot of infinite, subdivided into a lot of ever-changing units.

Typically, the behemothic cake of "the Centre Ages" is split up into roughly three parts: the early Middle Ages (500-1000), the high Middle Ages (1000-1300), and the late Middle Ages (1300-1500). The tardily Middle Ages shade imperceptibly into the equally vague period known as "the Renaissance": and it was during "the Renaissance" (and, afterward, during "the Reformation" and "the Enlightenment") that people began talking almost the "the Middle Ages" or even "the Dark Ages," writing off the preceding ten centuries every bit a useless detour. The loftier Middle Ages take gradually managed to shed some of the "Dark Ages" stigma: this was the time of troubadours, of soaring Gothic cathedrals, of vigorous scientific and philosophical enquiry, of quasi-modern literature like the letters of Abelard and Héloïse (which conclusively demonstrate that the feelings people have when they're being ghosted by an ex have not contradistinct a jot for the past 900 years), then the idea that "nothing" was going on during this menses is fairly speedily disproven.

The early on Middle Ages (500-1000), however, still go a pretty bad rap: information technology's thought of, even by some academics, as a period of cultural and technological stagnation. But I want to put in a good give-and-take for the early Middle Ages as a fourth dimension period that is well worth studying, and not just because it produced a lot of interesting texts and cute fine art. Information technology was a time, afterward all, when a massive political confederation (the western Roman Empire) was slowly, and sometimes painfully, reconstituting itself into new political units. Given that much of contempo human history has been the story of the building and sundering of political unions, and that our species may be doomed to come together and pull apart in this cyclical mode for the foreseeable hereafter, it seems worth paying attending to exactly how this happens at particular historical moments, with a view to doing information technology with more than goodwill and less bloodshed on hereafter occasions. Information technology is besides true that The Economy Was Weak during the early medieval menstruation, broadly speaking, relative to the periods earlier and after—but given the step at which nosotros are devouring our own planet, we might call up to be grateful that things slowed downwards a bit for five hundred years. The Romans, to give just one example, systematically hunted the great beasts of N Africa and Mediterranean Europe almost to the betoken of complete extinction, out of their intense appetite for animals to torture in gladiatorial games—and many people died in this agonizing fashion also, of course, for the edification of the Roman populace.

Rome may not have "fallen" in the dramatic fashion that'due south sometimes popularly imagined, but the societies that were once territorially encompassed past the western Roman Empire did change a lot during the Middle Ages. It is a rather interesting thing, if you wander through the pre-mod section of any art museum, to motility through the "Roman" rooms to the "medieval" ones. Y'all go from a lot of marble sculptures of jacked dudes (sans their original paint, and sometimes, alas, sans their original arms, thanks to the ravages of fourth dimension) and elaborate funerary portraiture, to—well, ordinarily, lots and lots of images of the human being body in excruciating pain. Saints staring fixedly at skulls, martyrs smiling blandly while holding simulcra of their soon-to-be-gouged out eyes in a little dish, wistful mothers holding plump, ugly babies, those same mothers continuing weeping while an emaciated, adult version of their kid is crucified before their eyes. The medieval world, very more often than not construed, was a globe that devoted a lot of imagination to human suffering, and besides to the love and pity that the witness of suffering gives ascent to. You could call this a morbid fixation, of course, but if yous are the sort of person who gets tired of the fashion mod club constantly pushes human suffering nether the carpeting, or treats it as a cheap form of amusement, something about this openness resonates—something almost it feels profoundly sane, for all its discomfiting oddness.

Now, I don't hateful to say that the Heart Ages were some kind of paradise of tenderness and empathy. That it was non, as a general matter, as the victims of whatever pogrom during the period could certainly tell y'all. Warring nobility were incredibly tearing: the Crusades were to some extent merely an endeavour to get as many of them as possible to become out of Europe and kill helpless people in some other damn place. The medieval Inquisition, though not equally wide-ranging or bloody an establishment as it'southward sometimes presented in popular culture, was, when operational, as thorough a listen-fuck every bit anything in 1984, with "spiritual physicians" diligently seeking to reprogram their patients dorsum to orthodoxy. And life more often than not could exist very difficult, of class. Much of the population was bound to the land, and while in some places peasants voted on local councils and probably wielded some degree of de facto control over their ain affairs, their horizons were very restricted, and as in all agrarian societies, when the weather was unfavorable likewise many seasons in a row, a lot of people died. Medieval medicine was not all quackery—a medieval recipe for an center salve was recently discovered to actually be incredibly effective at killing MRSA, for example—only it wasn't great, and in that location was a decently high lik elihood that you were going to die a medically gruesome death.

Merely! Simply! But! The by is another land, as they say; and as with countries very distant from one's own, distant periods in history are both startlingly familiar and fascinatingly strange. When studying whatsoever time in history, information technology is e'er an interesting do to look for human beings you recognize beneath the strange trappings of historical divergence. Many of us office-worker types, for case, volition perhaps relate to medieval scribes. Their candid marginalia, scrawled aslope the text of the books they were painstakingly copying, speaks of a general dissatisfaction with the tedium of their work ("Now I've written the whole thing, for Christ's sake give me a drink," wrote one irritable monk), shading into the kind existential dread that frequently comes over us in hours of drudgery ("This is sad!" wrote another. "O little volume! A day will come in truth when someone over your page will say, 'The paw that wrote it is no more.'")

I myself have a particular fondness for medieval Irish gaelic monks, who were something similar the perpetual international students or H1-B visa-holders of the early medieval world, constantly cropping upwards in distant courts and monasteries with their slightly off-kilter Latin and their intellectual bags of tricks. Ireland had never been function of the Roman globe, nor did information technology take a formal written language until the Latin alphabet was introduced with the coming of Christianity, merely the Irish gaelic quickly developed a reputation for scholarly talent. 1 Irish monk, Sedulius Scottus, installed himself in Liège in the mid-ninth century, where (in between flattering his warring patrons, much as academics do today) he wrote Latin poetry extolling a simple but pleasurable life:

I read or write, and I teach or search for truth;

I phone call on heaven's throne by night and by day.

I eat, beverage freely, and with rhymes invoke the muses:

and snoring I sleep, or keep vigil and pray to God.

Another, anonymous Irish poet, installed at a continental monastery around the same time, was very fond of his white cat, Pangur Bán, writing a delightful verse form in Irish gaelic about their happy cohabitation:

When nosotros ii are (tale without boredom)

alone in our house,

we have something to which we may apply our skill,

an endless sport.

… He is blithesome with swift motility

when a mouse sticks in his sharp hook.

I too am joyful

when I sympathize a dearly loved difficult question.

Though we are always like this,

neither of the states bothers the other:

each of us likes his arts and crafts,

rejoicing alone each in his.

Well, that's all very nice and hygge-like, y'all might say, but these guys were monks: they were societal elites, to some extent. What about the lives of ordinary people? That's e'er hard to speak most with much specificity: in societies where written literacy is limited and durable writing materials are costly, there'southward e'er a trouble of elite bias in surviving sources. From John Ball'south speech in the xivth century, we tin can gauge that there were probably festering discontents amidst the working classes, but we don't have too many of their own words.

Literary accounts aside, one mode to try to imagine yourself into the body of an ordinary person from some other time or identify is through a human universal: music. There'south a lot of surviving music from the high Middle Ages and onwards. Medieval scribes developed a system of musical notation called "neums," which isn't every bit precise equally modern musical notation, simply gives a pretty good thought of what the tune was supposed to be. From written descriptions and from manuscript illustrations, nosotros besides know what kinds of instruments were popular, and from this, a presumably fair approximation of medieval music can be reconstructed.

One of the biggest and near interesting collections of medieval music are the Cantigas de Santa Maria, written down in the 13th century in what is now Spain. These songs were centered around the Camino de Santiago, an important pilgrimage route that attracted rich and poor pilgrims alike, and was lined with hospitals to provide the travelers with nutrient, drink, and housing along their way: people made the journey to express devotion, do penance, or seek healing for their illnesses. Many of the songs have strong affinities with Arab musical forms, reflecting the fact that much of the Iberian peninsula was under Muslim governance throughout the Center Ages, and that there was, despite frequent political and religious conflicts, considerable cultural interchange between Christian and Islamic kingdoms.

T here are lots of recordings of the Cantigas available, and speaking as a consummate musical ignoramus, they are awfully fun to listen to. This is not Gregorian dirge (not that I take whatsoever trouble with Gregorian chant!), nor does it bear much resemblance to what we think of every bit "classical" music. These are songs made to walk to, or dance to: you tin can imagine people singing them together to enliven the long pilgrimage road. Some of the songs are simply lovely, like the vocal about a nun who falls pregnant and prays to help to the Virgin Mary, who then miraculously and painlessly removes the child from her trunk; or the song about a woman who prays to Mary to salvage her dying silkworms, promising in return to make her a beautiful silk altar-cloth by a item feast-solar day. Mary saves the farm, the woman somehow completely forgets to make the altar-cloth, but and so, in a second phenomenon, she discovers that the practiced silkworms have woven the cloth themselves of their ain accordance. Other songs, meanwhile, are completely bananas, like the song about a fornicator whom the Devil persuades to cut off his own penis and so kill himself. Mary intercepts his soul in the nick of time, as the Devil is carting it triumphantly off to hell, and restores the suicide's life—just, sadly, not his penis. (The first line of this insane ditty, incidentally, is "Non e gran cousa," which means something like "It's No Big Bargain"). Forth similarly horrifying lines, there's also a song almost a priest who spots a spider in the communion vino, but, knowing the wine is already consecrated, faithfully drains the loving cup, spider and all; when he subsequently sickens and prays to Mary for assist, she guides the physician to make a pocket-size pigsty in his arm, after which a live fucking spider crawls out of it (MARY WHY), which the astonished congregation of nuns decide to keep as a pet. Additionally—while there are a handful of predictably skeevy songs nearly Jews and Muslims getting upwardly to evil deeds—there are as well a number of songs with a marked theme of interfaith entente, similar the song about how a Muslim rex besieged by another Muslim king calls on his Christian allies for help. They come to battle with a banner of the Virgin Mary, and Mary, seeing this, helps the Christians' Muslim friends to victory. It'due south not exactly Kumbayah, but the refrain of the vocal is probably not something the Deus Vult oversupply would be hugely in favor of: Pero que seja a gente / d' outra lei e descreuda / os que a Virgen mais aman / a esses ela ajuda. "Though they may be of another law and unbelievers, those who love the Virgin almost, them she will help."

A very frequent theme of this strange repertoire of songs is that Mary will help literally anyone. It doesn't thing what you did; information technology doesn't matter if you spiral up your penance; it doesn't affair if you fifty-fifty believe in her. Ask and ye shall receive; she is your mother and she volition take intendance of you. Opiate of the masses, you could call information technology, to get people on the route and spending money on pilgrimage souvenirs. But I even so can't help but discover information technology rather moving. This belief in universal love crops up too in ane of the best-beloved works of the high Center Ages, the "Showings" of Julian of Norwich, which is the get-go known work in English language by a female author. Aged thirty and about death from a astringent illness, this "poor unlettered brute" (though she was perhaps laying that part on a bit thick; women weren't allowed to preach, so oftentimes resorted to "visions" to express their theological views) had a lengthy fever-dream in which she saw the whole of the created universe sitting small every bit a hazelnut in the palm of Christ'due south hand. From this mystic vision, she understood that God had fabricated this fragile thing, and loved it, and would proceed it; that he existed in full communion with all the suffering in the world; that although sin existed, God had compassion for everyone, most of all for weak and miserable sinners, and would never abandon anyone, but would help every living affair to become proficient. The almost famous line of Julian'southward vision is also perhaps the best supplication e'er made for dire times:

And all shall be well, and all shall exist well, and all style of thing shall be well.